Review: [untitled]
Author(s): John Peradotto
Reviewed work(s): The Identity of Oedipus the King by Alister Cameron
Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 67, No. 3, (Feb. - Mar., 1972), pp. 282-285
Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3296606
Accessed: 11/07/2008 10:46
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B OOK
RE
VIE
W
S
editorH. JAMESSHEY
The identity of Oedipus the king, by ALISTER representativeof Apollo and riddler; the sphinx,
New York: New York University not as cannibal bogy only, but as intellectual
Press 1968. Pp.xxiii,165. $6.95.
monster and riddler (in Cameron's words,
"Apollo's creature"); the Delphic oracles to
IN HIS PREFACECameron warns us that read- Laius and Oedipus; Oedipus himself, not so
ers interested in interpretations of a purely much as Bronze-age warrior hero or slayer
Freudian, historical or anthropological kind of monsters, but as intellectual hero, solver of
had best look elsewhere. He distinguishes the riddles, seeker of his identity, self-blinded when
Freudian, historical and anthropologicalcontent the truth is known: all conspire to build and
from Sophocles' play itself, or from what he bond between the Delphic god of discoveries
refers to as the form of the play. As he puts and the Theban hero a line of connection as
it, "how the thing is done, this process of the sure as the road between Thebes and Delphi,
play itself and of our own thinking about it, where Sophocles, in another apparent innovais always of the first importance." And in tion, locates the fatal encounter of father and
view of the central position this play has al- son (Aeschylus, contriving an essentially difways held in the history and theory of tragedy, ferent mythos, set the event south of Thebes
Cameron is also concerned to determine if and on the road to Plataea near Potniae, thus reto what extent "it contains the shape of tragedy inforcing the theme of the curse-laden Erinys
that is "a binding formal principle of his plot"
as no other does."
Cameron's distinction between pre- or non- [Cameron], the source of its "essential unity"
Sophoclean content and Sophoclean form im- [Jebb]).
Only after all the pre-Sophoclean Oedipuses
plies a considerable measure of independence
from tradition. Accordingly, in his first chap- have been laid to one side and the Sophoclean
ter he argues that the conventional nature of Oedipus seen in the light of Delphic and fifthGreek tragedy has been largely overestimated, century ideas of self-discovery does Cameron
and that what Aristotle calls the "unbreakable" begin, in chapter 2, his analysis of the play.
elements of a traditional story (Poetics He starts with a distinction between the Aris1453b.22) are so elemental as to allow the totelian term mythos, meaning primarily "the
Greek poet a virtually free hand in construct- plotted sequence," and what Cameron chooses
ing his plot. The point here is that there is no to call theme, "a more comprehensive struccanonical version, no ur-myth, no privileged ture . . . as dictated by what the dramatist
account which allows one to distinguish (as so has to say in the given subject." This primary
many critics do) between "the myth" and the structure is found to be tripartite, each diplay. The play, insofar as it is a made story, vision corresponding to a different kind of
is itself a myth, and the poet is literally a question posed by Oedipus: the first, down to
maker, no less of stories than of speeches, where Jocasta gives her account of Laius'
verses, lyric songs, dance patterns, visual murder-"Who is the murderer?";the second,
effects, etc., as Aristotle himself insists down to the entrance of the Corinthian herds(1451b.27) and Cameron reminds us. Here man-"Am I the murderer?";the third, to the
he scrutinizes the history of Oedipus before recognition-"Who am I?" These three are
Sophocles. What emerges from this recon- seen as successive stages in the inevitable disstruction is the uniqueness of Sophocles' ar- covery of Oedipus of his identity. If the busitistic choices, all calculated to centralize an ness of tragedy is to show us how what starts
element not hitherto prominent even where as a fearful and fascinating prospect becomes
present-ignorance and self-discovery, or, if inevitable, then the first and second of these
you will, self-recognition and its consequences. three stages represent the relentless exploraTeiresias, not as Theban seer only, but as tion and elimination of alternatives: namely,
CAMERON.
283
THE CLASSICAL JOURNAL
the possible identification of Oedipus not by
himself but by Teiresias, either alone or along
with Creon (as presumably occurred in other
versions), and the possible abandonment of
the search, as both Teiresias and Jocasta urge
and Oedipus himself comes near doing at 669672. What aborts these possible alternatives,
and also what drives the action on when in
the first two stages events seem to have played
themselves out to a standstill, is the character
of Sophocles' Oedipus. He explicitly guarantees the inevitability of the sequence when, in
answer to Jocasta's desperate plea to stop the
search, he replies that that would make him
some other sort of man (ovK av
e'EX0oI/' Er-t /
7ror' JaAXo,
TTrE,
'K/aOelv
rovLuov yEVOs
1084 f.). This unique identification between
the action (=the question "Who am I?")
and the character of Oedipus is what accounts
for this play's special purchase on the essence
of the tragic experience.
But Cameron sees the first two divisions,
not only as stages of a continuous action, but
also as different, nearly self-contained contexts
of action in which the discovery could be accomplished, each with a separate situation, a
development, a climax, but with an aborted
resolution or catastrophe. The first is political,
with Oedipus engaged in a misconceived
struggle to maintain power, cast very like
Creon in the Antigone. The second is divine,
with Oedipus as victim of a ruthless god, like
the hero of the Ajax. The third division ("Who
am I?"), into which the other two finally turn,
has no proper parallel as a context of action,
for while there may be plays in which unknown identity is discovered, none except the
Ot contains the self-discovery of an identity
unknown even to the self, a self-discovery that
is, not merely a product of the action, but the
whole of the action, and this in such a way
that the tragic is identified with the whole
being of the protagonist. The structured effect
here is of three tragedies set down next to
one another, the first two leading inevitably
into the tragedy of the self, which, in Cameron's words, "makes explicit and articulate
what is implicit in the others."
The stress in chapter 2 is on the character
of Oedipus-the compulsion within that makes
the action inevitable. Chapter 3 takes up the
more complicated matter of the outer compulsion, the gods, more particularly Apollo
and his part in the action. Here Cameron
vigorously opposes Knox, Kirkwood, Kitto,
Whitman, et al., in the relative unimportance
which they assign the role of Apollo. Against
variations on what he calls the "extreme humanist" view (e.g., Whitman, Sophocles,
p. 142: "The gods as personages are not in
the plays; they do nothing that life could not
do."), Cameron maintains that Apollo is an
abiding "condition of the movement of events"
(p. 64); "wherever we touch the play we
find the gods" (p. 79). His first body of evidence consists of key-statements made by
characters within the play, e.g., Teiresias at
376 f., Oedipus at 1329. Secondly, the choral
odes: the parodos as a prayer for deliverance
answered by the appearance of Oedipus; the
first stasimon describing Apollo's pursuit of the
murderer; the second stasimon in its expression of despair lest Apollo's honor perish and
all religion with it, followed immediately by
Jocasta's prayer to Apollo and, as if in answer,
the arrival of the Corinthian herdsman. More
convincingly, Cameron examines the action itself, which he plays through as if the gods
were absent, to demonstrate how it must collapse without them. His basic contention (a
sorely debatable one) is that coincidence argues
to divine activity, especially the heavy occurrence of it, without which the purposes and
characters of the dramatis personae are insufficient to sustain the action of this play and
its prior assumptions: the timely arrival of
the Corinthian herdsman when, in Corneille's
words, "the actors wouldn't know where to
take hold, nor what attitude to strike if he
had arrived an hour later" (Cameron: "There
were other days for Polybus to die."); the
Theban survivor-herdsman-exposer,brought on
so shortly after the Corinthian'sarrival as witness to the murder of Laius, then suddenly and
quite unexpectedly identified as the childexposer by the Coryphaeus ("It cannot be
seen how he could know that," says Cameron).
Such events belong in a class with the death
of the murderer of Mitys (Aristotle, Poetics
1452a). They imply design, Cameron insists,
and design implies a designer. He argues
against the application to this play of that
principle of criticism which sees tragedy as
a set of parallel actions, one human and one
divine, operating on separate levels. This he
sees as just another version of the humanist
position, allowing for intervention, but confining it to prior events. He insists that the
gods are not "out there" somewhere, but
inside the events, as "a constant 'supernatural
soliciting' of the action." In Cameron's opinion, it is precisely this dense, unanalyzed confusion of divine and human responsibility that
lies behind Plato's objection to tragedy.
Chapter 4 concentrates on the denouement,
especially the self-blinding and the kommos,
sections of the play usually given less than
adequate treatment in much criticism which
284
wrongly assumes that the action is complete
with the recognition of Oedipus' identity, as
if action were the equivalent of intrigue. For
Cameron, the recognition is not in itself an
act; it is the acquisition of knowledge from
which act must follow. The act of the play in
Cameron's eyes is the self-blinding. It truly
catches the actor in the act, "grasping the
whole tragedy in the crucial act." But what
is more important, the self-blinding, though
it seems to introduce choice and will into
1229 f.),
the action (KaKai eKOITvraIOVK (aKOVTCL
should not be considered essentially different
from the prior actions of the play-actions,
namely, committed against the self, compounded of human and divine agency. It is
not, Cameron argues, any more or less voluntary than Oedipus' other actions, nor is it the
product of deliberation and reflection (Knox's
view). The daimon that haunts the kommos
is still less Heraclitean ethos than external
force. What is new about the self-blinding,
Cameron claims, is not the character of the
action but the statement about it (1329-1331):
the crucial discovery by Oedipus that he is
something more than mere victim, that he
acts on his own fate.
In the last chapter, Cameron takes up a
striking characteristic of the Ot: the manner
in which critical events of the past are not
introduced merely to fill the audience in on
the story or to get the action under way, but
thoroughly taken into the action of the play.
Past actions are in a sense re-enacted in the
present, as, for example, when the killing of
Laius comes just short of being repeated in
the nearly homicidal outburst of Oedipus
against another kinsman, Creon, or when
Oedipus confronting the enigmatic Teiresias
conjures up the young Oedipus faced with
Delphi's obscurity and the riddle of the sphinx.
Where the past is so thoroughly re-created, and
where the impression of time is that of a
continuous present, without past or future, the
guilt or innocence of Oedipus in the patricide
and incest can and must be judged by his
present actions. And here, Cameron argues,
his characterimpresses us as almost exactly the
opposite of the injured innocent; "on the contrary, he seizes his fate and throws the whole
force of his personality into it." To the builtin ignorance of the situation, Oedipus adds an
inner blindness, "a condition of the soul,"
which makes him fit for his fate. "However
monstrous the things given," Cameron says,
'the man has a capacity for them"r(p. 141).
But, out of the merciless and hopeless built-in
fatality of the world, tragedy discovers two
positive elements: honor, even from the gods,
FEBRUARY
1972
and the capacity for action which declares the
self.
There are a few scattered points where
Cameron's argument could perhaps have been
strengthened. In citing Pindaric Oedipusmaterial, he might have referred to the hero's
apparently legendary skill at solving riddles
evident in Pyth. 4.263 (yvOLtvvv Trv O8itTr8a
croctav). Marie Delcourt's convincing reconstruction of the sphinx in archaic tradition as
a female erotic demon who assaults and rapes
young men (in her otherwise uneven Oedipe
ou la ldgende du conquerant [Paris 1944])
would have rounded out his survey of its part
in the tradition before Sophocles. On the selfblinding, Cameron (p. 27, n. 25) misquotes
the fragment from Euripides' Oedipus
(541N2), writing "son of Laius" instead of
"son of Polybus," and thus overlooks an important fact: the blinding was, not only done
by others in that play, but also occurred
before the discovery of Oedipus' identity.
Again on the self-blinding, Cameron's contention that it is not essentially different from
Oedipus' prior actions could be further supported by the fact that it is prophesied by
Teiresias (419, 454). In discussing the parallelism between the murder of Laius and the
murderous threats made to Creon, Cameron's
argument (that Creon is a kinsman, "by mar,'" p. 130) misses
riage to be sure, but ...
more obvious and remarkably stronger evidence: Creon is a kinsman by blood, in fact
Oedipus' maternal uncle-a second father!
It appears somewhat odd that a book on
Oedipus, published in 1968, shoulddbear no
reference, even in passing, to the work of
Claude Levi-Strauss,especially his widely cited
article "The structural study of myth," in
which the Oedipus myth serves as a methodological model. As an interpretation, to be
sure, it is in many ways deficient, as LeviStrauss himself declares, but the structural
methodology is one which might have added
more muscle to Cameron's analysis, especially
what he has to say on myth in chapter 1,
and would have made him perhaps more hesitant in his dismissal of Freud, whose interpretation is simply another version of the myth for
Levi-Strauss. Cameron's notion of form seems
to come very close to Levi-Strausson structure:
"If there is any meaning to be found in
mythology, this cannot reside in the isolated
elements which enter into the composition
of a myth, but only in the way those elements
are combined." If (as another structuralist,
Roland Barthes, maintains) a science of literature depends upon the possibility of construing literary works as myth, then classicists
THE CLASSICAL
JOURNAL
must surely come to terms with such an influential methodology, if only to dismiss it.
Misprints abound in Cameron's book, especially where Greek is quoted. Errata were
noticed on p. 27, 34, 92 (3), 93, 130, 134,
141, 143, 151, 153, 156, 162, 164.
285
intimacy with Latin literature, is a critical
study of only those parts of it which have
actively engaged the sensibility and enthusiasm of the critic. Copley's "heart" clearly
inclined him to write the latter and doubtless
he could have produced a much better book
if he had done so. (There is a third option
JOHNPERADOTTOthat might be mentioned: a survey written
from a completely new perspective, radically
State University of New York at Buffalo
reinterpretingand revaluating Latin literature.)
Judged as personal, but informed, criticism,
the book is open to objection for large sections
included only out of a sense of duty or a desire
for completeness. Judged as a comprehensive
history, it is open to criticism for its proporLatin literature: from the beginnings to the tions, both within a single author's works and
close of the second century A.D., by FRANKO. within the history of Latin literature as a
COPLEY. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan whole. For example, there are eleven pages
on Cicero's philosophical works, but only three
Press 1969. Pp.372. $12.50.
on all the rest; there are four pages on the
ACCORDING
TO THE JACKET, "this . . compreEclogues, nine on the Georgics, and fifty-three
hensive history offers a critical account of five on the Aeneid; the Metamorphoses receives
centuries of Latin literature" and indeed this only five pages, despite the high esteem in
is what the austere and inclusive title and which Copley seems to hold it. As for relative
subtitle of the book and the format of the emphasis on different authors, Sallust fares in
the text only slightly better than Cornelius
contents page ("I. The Beginnings . . .II.
Nepos (two or three lines plus a few inciAndronicus, Naevius, and Ennius . . .III.
Plautus . .. IV. Terence . . . V. Lucilius
. ," dental citations elsewhere) and does not apand so on) lead one to expect. But Copley pear at all in the bibliography of translations
himself makes no such grand claims. That his and supplemental reading. (I am not necesintentions were more modest and more per- sarily quarreling with Copley's preferences: the
sonal can be assumed from his statement in a point is that one cannot indulge them in a
prefatory note that the book "was written from comprehensive history.) Ennius, Lucilius, and
the heart, in every sense of the word." That Cato each receive more space than Caesar,
he had a different sort of book in mind is Sallust, Tibullus, Lucan, Martial, Juvenal, and
also implied in the disarming remark in the several others one would expect to come in
same note that "most of the factual informa- for fuller treatment. Cato in fact gets altion in this book came from J. Wight Duff's most as much space as Livy and Tacitus,
two volumes on the history of Latin literature" whose Histories is barely noticed and whose
and in the fact that in case of the "interpretive Annals is very skimpily treated. In the case
material"Duff is the only named scholar among of too many authors, Copley's skimpy covmany whose influence he acknowledges (pre- erage fails to provide the basic information
sumably Duff most often came in handy with about theme, contents, etc., that one looks
those Latin authors whom Copley finds uncon- for in a handbook.
It is after Vergil that Copley really runs
genial, but who had to be included in a
out of steam. For his views on the relative
"comprehensive history").
We do not have here a simple case of value of pre- and post-Vergilian literature, see
misunderstanding between publisher and au- p. 117, 275, and 357. Copley is not among
thor. In fact, there is a fundamental split those who find an uncomfortable but real
running throughout the work, as Copley tries relevance to the 1960's and 1970's in such postto write two kinds of book at the same time. Vergilianliteratureas Seneca's tragedies, Lucan,
One is a comprehensive survey, a reference Petronius, and Juvenal.
work in which something has to be said about
Of course this selectivity does have its good
almost every author who has survived or about side. Far from having the uncritical reverence
whom anything is known. (Whether or not for all things ancient that still afflicts some
such a genre is any longer viable is a moot classicists and which the standard histories
question; perhaps only if it sticks to the with "equal time" for all tend to reflect and
facts and leaves interpretation and evaluation to foster, Copley is always ready to warn the
alone.) The other, the fruit of years of reader that an author or a part of an author